Newman

Chapter 4

Peter Newman ran his small business from his home — an attractive, rambling old house set in fertile, undulating countryside, near enough to the city to give his family and business access to its benefits, but far enough to protect them from most of its less desirable attributes such as the squalor and frenzy and violence.

John Newman’s earliest memories were fringed with smoky autumn leaves and leaden winter skies over white clad landscapes, but were mainly of grass and trees and sunlight, and images of his father, white shirted and bare armed, gazing into the sky. Almost as soon as he could walk he had been drawn into his father’s l**t for life, and was marched and carried over miles of the surrounding countryside.

Not all his memories were pleasant however, as he had an almost lethal mixture of inquisitiveness and persistence in his makeup, and even under the supervision of his father, frequently acquired cuts, bruises, stings, and other of the troubles to which youthful flesh is heir. Also in his makeup was a reserve and a strange deep sense of pride, and very seldom did he weep or even cry out when hurt. Once he walked over three miles across fields, through hedges and over ditches, sporting a huge gash in his leg brought about by an unsuccessful vault over a barbed wire fence. His black eyes watched the ensuing turmoil impassively as he stood like a still centre, while a pool of blood expanded over the white tiled kitchen floor. His mother turned alternately white then red, and his father moved quietly, quickly and purposefully from telephone to first aid box, with panic and horror only just hidden behind concerned eyes. John Newman winced as the doctor stuck needles into him and sewed up the wound, but though his lip trembled and he held his father’s hand tightly, he volunteered no other reaction.

His father would look at him pensively at times. “Look at the lad,” he would say. “He’d choke before he’d cry. It’s not as if I’ve ever given him the ‘big boys don’t cry’ rubbish. Where does it come from?”

“He’s like your father,” said Ann.

Peter sighed and put his hand to his forehead. “I hope not,” he said. “But you could be right, he’s certainly like him physically.”

Ann looked at him in surprise. “You’d never noticed had you? He’s exactly like your father. Same temperament, same looks, everything.”

Peter did not reply immediately. His wife’s remarks had brought about that strange mental metamorphosis which occurs when that which was obscure becomes, without changing, blindingly obvious. He quailed inwardly at the revelation and wondered how his wife could accept it so casually. But then, she only knew the surface layers of his father: those which he chose to expose. Peter knew the darker reaches, and sensed worse. He knew how that stern temperament could develop.

“Not absolutely everything, I hope. It looks as if I’ve surrounded myself after all,” he said.

His wife put her arm around him. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’re away from the business now. The family ties are broken. Besides, you’re not surrounded. There’s quite a lot of your father in you, or you wouldn’t have been able to do it. John will be all right.”

Ironically, it was only because Peter carried his father’s personality in some degree that John did indeed ‘turn out all right’. Instinctively he treated the boy with openness and consistency and, where possible, fairness. But whenever John tested the limits of his emotional terrain, he found in his father an age-tempered implacability that he knew he could not yet match. He learned early that it was unwise to play one parent against the other. On the rare occasions he tried and succeeded, it was to face not a burst of his father’s summary justice, but a sad wall of parental reproach more painful than anything that happened to him whenever he misjudged his father’s mood during a ‘debate’.

Peter learned too. He learned, as many had learned before, that though you may love your children, and they you, they can slip through your defences like water, and plunge a rasp across your nerve ends without mercy. He learned how easily a killing instinct could be invoked with the right key. Intellectually, he had always accepted that as part of his humanity he must be mainly predator: hunter and killer. But now he knew it emotionally, having felt a red-eyed demon surging in him, albeit briefly, for the first time since his own childhood. It shocked him a little at first, but being perceptive enough to see it, he was perceptive enough to accept rather than deny it, and thereby effectively tamed it.

As the need grew to accommodate John’s increasingly vigorous personality, the vehicles for the more complex ground rules shifted away from direct force majeure, and became ‘the deal’. Whenever Peter felt his son entrenching himself for a long siege, he would look at him, man to man, and say, “OK. Let’s do a deal.” And then, generally speaking, he would proceed to have most of his own way by virtue of higher reasoning power and lower cunning.

Peter’s business ticked over steadily. It was sufficiently successful to protect them from the rigours of poverty, but would never make them rich. The work was spasmodic, and Peter worked as required, sometimes normal office hours, sometimes weekends and into the early hours of the morning. Then he would have days with nothing to do, either through lack of work, in which case he would make a nuisance of himself by prowling around the house fretfully, or because he had successfully passed all his immediate problems to someone else, in which case he would make a nuisance of himself by prowling around the house self-righteously. Ann would eventually tire of moving around him, and roar, “Have you nothing to do?” To which he would reply with a smirk, “No,” and make a tennis stroke gesture to demonstrate his administrative expertise in delegation. “Only an idle man does not appreciate the value of leisure,” he usually concluded.

So the three of them grew and thrived, their mildly chaotic lifestyle underlain by a continuity of affection, and made whole by an almost complete lack of concern for society’s expectations of them. In many ways a complete and happy family.